Eden
by Julia Claire
Summary: -His life is built in perfect, neat rows.- Roger Davies looks into the Mirror of Erised.  Rated T for some more adult themes.


**Disclaimer: Anything you recognize isn't mine.**

_A/N: Written for the Mirror of Erised Competition at the HPFC Forum. (And, incidentally, extremely different from anything I've ever done before.)_

Eden

His life is built in perfect, neat rows. There's never been any disorder there, any dysfunction, like his perfect, chiseled features, his icy eyes, blue as the banner they drape around him, when Ravenclaw wins a match.

Roger Davies – he is the respectful, attentive, dutiful son, the kind that always does what is asked of him. He is the gifted, big-boned athlete with a sort of muscled grace in the movement of his limbs. He is the intelligent, dedicated student. And he is the handsome face, with the wide, easy grin, shaggy brown hair, the object of all the girls' affections.

He is an only child; his parents dote on him; the whole world loves him.

(Roger, Roger, Roger – they chant on the Quidditch Pitch, as he flies high above them, a huge mass of blue and bronze, as he grins down upon them…)

His life is Eden (his family has always been very religious) – but there is no snake and no apple, for there is nothing that could ever tempt him.

(What does he even want for?)

-x-

Fleur Delacour is the first girl he loves.

She creates a stir as soon as she walks into the Great Hall of Hogwarts, under a starry ceiling, removing her furs. It's a fight, among the boys, to stand nearest to her in the halls, to get her a new quill when hers breaks, to attend on her, hand and foot.

(It's a fight he enters like a dog among other dogs, drawn by the pack – but it's also a fight he usually wins.)

It's he the gets accepted, out of the masses waiting and hoping and asking for her – she has to prompt him, a little, to get the words out, which he's checked and double-checked in several different dating books he found in the library.

"Would you like to… go to the… to the… ball with me?" Stuttered words, shaky grin, hand slicking back his hair. It feels vaguely like a scientific formula.

"_Yes_."

He throws himself into her, at the ball, into her shining white teeth and her symmetrical features and her curves and angles and proportions.

There is something about her – it is probably the Veela charm – like a scent, that he can lose himself in, that draws him like no girl ever has before…. That he has to concentrate on hard, or he'll lose, he'll miss.

(He can't ever remember a word she speaks, that night.)

And there's something amidst the dim blackness, the scented whirlwind into which he lets himself be lost – there's something there that feels suspiciously like _duty_ or _relief_, but he prefers not to think about that.)

Yet later, later, the next day, when all his friends are asking about how his night was, with Fleur Delacour, (nudge, nudge, wink, wink – it disgusts him), and if he's going to see her again, he cannot drudge up any real excitement, any real feelings about her at all.

She is beautiful, he tells himself – he knows that – and he is too, and she is exactly the girl he could someday marry and live with in a small brick house with a picket white fence. He can see it all stretched before him, an extension of the perfect lines that guide him life, which he follows without deviation…

"Of course I'll see her again," he says. "Of course."

She grows bored with him, in the end – and he plays the part of the heartbroken sod, with wistful sighs and dreamy looks. She is the first girl he loved, he tells himself, and that's why it takes him so long to see any other girl again and feel something like what he felt for Fleur…

(What he _must_ have felt for her.)

-x-

But he moves on at last, in his seventh year at Hogwarts – because that's what is expected, that's what's normal.

"Godric, Cho Chang is so freaking _hot_," one of his friends moans as they watch her and her big group of girls walk past. "If I wasn't already taken…"

"Better not let Elizabeth hear you say that," another boy cuts in. "Oi, but Roger – you should go for her, mate."

"You think?" he says, putting a hand to his chin and a thoughtful expression of his face as he makes his eyes follow Cho across the courtyard.

And then they're all punching him in the shoulder and laughing and telling him to go do it – now – and calling him a chicken when he does.

So he does, the next week, waltzing up to her and just asks her, flat out. She doesn't really affect him like Fleur ever did.

When she turns him down, he has to take care to arrange his perfect face so his relief doesn't show.

-x-

Alaina is next – with a name like a princess and blond hair to match, she is a perfect replacement for Fleur, except that she lacks that scent, that drug, which drew him in.

But she's a good kisser – or so he reckons, because that's what he's heard. He's a good kisser too – or so he reckons, because that's what _he's_ heard. They spend most of their relationship snogging, in bushes and cupboards and Madame Puddifoot's Tea Shop, and yeah, it's fun, it's good, it's nice, it's what his friends always tease him for.

It's what he thinks he wants, because it's laid out for him.

-x-

"Oi – Roger, Roger!"

He turns, in the corridor, and Alaina, whose hand he had been holding, to see the boy running towards them, waving a rolled up piece of parchment.

"We'll be late," she says, sliding her grip from his – her hand is always sweaty, but his is icy cold.

"That's okay," he says. "You go ahead. "I'll wait."

She slips off, and he stands and watches the boy – stocky, medium height, brown hair, laughing unusual eyes, one green and one blue – skid to a halt in front of him. "You dropped this. I think it's yours, anyway – says your name, right at the top."

"Yes," he says, finding it a little hard to look away from those eyes, yet doing so at last as he unrolls the parchment and stares at the rows of his tiny, mechanical handwriting. "It's my History of Magic essay. Thanks."

The boy nods. "I'm Terry, by the way – I suppose you don't know me, but I know you." He sticks out his hand.

Roger shakes it, a little nervously.

"Well, see you around," Terry says, and smiles hard one more time before racing to catch up with a group of fifth years clustered around a nearby classroom.

Roger watches him go. The next day, they wave and smile at each other when they pass in the corridor.

-x-

He goes into the Ministry after Hogwarts, following in his father's footsteps, donning a nice set of dark work robes and the new title, Junior Assistant to the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, to add to all his other ones, to his long, neat list of names, successes, achievements.

Sometimes, it seems his life is made up of titles, of names, of (dutiful) roles. He is happy now – or at least, he is living the formula for a happy life, with a good job, good money, a pretty, wholesome girl on his arm to sit next to him at Ministry events and dinners with his parents.

(But under the cheers that still echo for him, wherever he goes – Roger, Roger, Roger – under the geometrically-sound lines of his life, there is a hum, like the sound that comes before a whisper, the sound that rings in a silent room, the hum of _something,_ missing.

Sometimes he feels trapped within the tidy, neat stacks, the folders of papers on his desk and the aspersions of picket white fences, like a stone statue, passionless and perfect and _sinless_.)

-x-

He sees Terry, once in Diagon Alley, where the sun is hot, but he still feels cold, walking with his girlfriend, Mary-Alice, window-shopping.

Roger almost raises a hand in greeting, almost calls out to him – and then he thinks, what is he doing? He doesn't even know this boy, with the different-colored, unmatching eyes; they aren't even friends.

So his hand falls back to rest at his side, stiff and unused, and he has to ask Mary-Alice to repeat her question.

-x-

He doesn't fight in the Battle of Hogwarts; at the time that it happened, he is busy typing up his report on the theft of three silver cauldrons from a shop in Diagon Alley.

So it isn't until the day after that he goes back to Hogwarts, taking a day off work for the first day in his life – (because everyone else is) – and at first, he only follows the crowds around, exclaiming and nodding and saying, "What a tragic loss," and "What a hero," and "What a lovely, lovely day…" whenever appropriate.

There are bodies stacked in the chamber off of the Great Hall, ones no one has had a chance to move yet. He surveys them artlessly, nearly expressionlessly – he is sorry for those who died, for their families, but he did not really know any of the them…

It is that moment when he sees the body – medium build, a little thick-set, chesnut hair damp, now, with sweat and blood, eyes, one blue and one green, closed, never to be seen again. There is another boy leaning over the body.

"That's not…" Roger finds, suddenly, that his voice is unreliable. "Terry Boot, is it?"

A dark face looks up at his, swimming with crusted blood and tears. "Yeah," the boy says, simply, dully, disbelievingly. "It is."

Roger takes the time to nod before he walks away.

-x-

He spends the rest of the day avoiding everyone and everything, walking around the halls of Hogwarts like a ghost, his face pale, his eyes wide, his hands sweaty. He does not know what he is looking for, searching for, why he is even acting like this, but there has to – there just –

He never remembers finding the door, or the room, or the mirror – before there he is, in front of it, staring up at the senseless, meaningless words, Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi upon it. He takes the time to straighten up, to lift his head, before looking into it, perhaps so he can reassure himself, when he looks upon his own image, that his perfect life – that protects him, keeps him safe, secure, in, that all he has ever believed in – is still intact.

Except that when he looks in the mirror, it is not just him there – Terry Boot is standing there as well, young and whole and alive, with his eyes that don't match, have never matched. His lips are dark red, Roger notices, not for the first time, the color of an apple, and so very close to Roger's own pale ones...

Roger Davies stands there, immobile, as he watches those lips touch.

The din of the silent hum rises, like the swell of ocean waves before breaking point, over the echoes of the cheers and the chants (Roger, Roger) and the lists and the perfections… over the walls of the heavenly garden, the life he has locked himself in. He stands, immobile, in understanding – what he has always known but never wanted to see, there – and there is shame, too, disgust in his dirty sin. There is embarrassment, elation, love, and revilement of these, all mixed up, messed up, blurring the lines and the rows and the set dark ink of his mechanical handwriting.

He throws himself at the mirror, pounding his fists against the glass – but the truth will not bend, and the truth will not break, and leaning his head against the cool reflection, tears pouring down his beautiful face, he is hit with the last swell of the torrent inside of him.

Roger Davies feels regret – but it does not matter now, for one of those boys in the mirror is dead and one of them never lived at all.


End file.
